The Spectacle

You can feel something’s off with the 1998 Godzilla about ten minutes in. You don’t need to see the whole thing to know Roland Emmerich misunderstood the assignment. He turned the most iconic monster ever into a bloated lizard that moves like a guy in a suit—which it was, but somehow less convincing. The film arrived like a massive shrug.

The Japanese versions understood what Godzilla actually is: a force of nature, something that doesn’t negotiate with you, doesn’t have motives you can reason with. It’s apocalypse with a tail. But that’s not how Hollywood thinks. So for years, I figured Godzilla in America was a dead thing, killed by that one film.

Then they decided to resurrect it again. Different director, different crew, but the same basic instinct: throw money at it, cast some recognizable faces (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen), and see if spectacle alone can carry you across two hours.

I expected nothing. The trailer proved me wrong about one thing: you can make destruction look compelling, even if the character delivering it is a guy in a motion-capture suit. There’s something honest about that kind of filmmaking. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the whole point of a movie like this—you sit in the dark, something massive and terrifying dominates the screen for a while, and for a couple of hours you get to feel small again. It’s not art, but it’s not nothing either.